Here’s how Alex Rodrigues envisions the future of trucking: Big rigs get loaded as usual and a driver pilots them to a spot on the edge of the highway. The driver hops out and the 18-wheeler cruises down the freeway for hundreds of miles in autonomous mode (presumably with pit stops at full-service gas stations). There’s no human aboard. Once it nears its destination, the truck pulls off to another roadside stop, where a different driver hops in to take it through city streets to wherever it’s being unloaded.

As CEO and co-founder of San Mateo’s Embark, a startup focusing on self-driving technology for commercial trucks, Rodrigues is working to make that vision a reality. After almost a year in stealth mode, Embark revealed its technology on Friday.

The company has been testing its self-driving system on a 2017 Peterbilt truck in Nevada, after gaining permission from regulators there. Tests of autonomous vehicles over 10,000 pounds are not legal in California. Uber’s Otto subsidiary, also focused on autonomous trucks, drives its vehicles in the state, but says those tests are legal because a driver maintains control (state regulators say they are looking into Otto’s tests).

Rather than a job-killer for truck drivers, Rodrigues sees this concept as improving their lives, allowing them to do short hops instead of long hauls. “People want to sleep in their own beds instead of being on the road several nights a week,” he said.

However, drivers and union officials are concerned that self-driving technology could eventually lead to job losses.

Embark’s technology sounds similar to that of Otto and other autonomous vehicle developers: It uses sensors like radar, cameras and lidar (a laser form of radar) to perceive the world, with artificial intelligence to analyze all the data they generate and tell the truck what to do.

But Embark’s vision slightly veers from that of Otto. While Otto also wants to make trucks autonomous during long stretches on the freeway, its concept is that the drivers will stay aboard, able to sleep or do other things, thus increasing their efficiency and extending their driving time.

Ultimately, of course, neither Embark nor Otto can dictate how their technologies are used on U.S. roads. “It will depend on government regulations,” said Bob Costello, chief economist at the American Trucking Associations, the industry’s largest trade group.

While Costello has no opinion on the companies, he sees autonomy’s potential to make truck driving a safer and easier job. “Our assumption is you won’t get rid of the drivers, but there’s still a lot of benefits” to various types of driver-assist technology, he said.

Programming trucks to drive on freeways is simpler than teaching vehicles to navigate city streets. “We have a unique system optimized for highways,” Rodrigues said. “We made different design decisions, such as sensors configured to see farther. It has a simpler ‘brain,’ not as smart as the brain needed to drive in the city.”

Rodrigues is 21, but he’s been steeped in robotics since age 13. His junior high team built a dishwasher-size robot that could play basketball. A team he ran at 15 built a robot that could pick up and stack crates.

“Alex reminds me of (young) Mark Zuckerberg; when I met him I was at Friendster trying to buy Facebook,” said Jim Scheinman, managing partner at Maven Ventures, which invested in Embark’s seed round. Neither that investment nor the total round are disclosed. Both young founders impressed Scheinman as “really, really bright — thoughtful but decisive.”

Maven was an early investor in San Francisco self-driving startup Cruise, which General Motors acquired for $1 billion last year.

“We see 3,000 companies a year and make six investments; we don’t invest in young companies willy-nilly,” Scheinman said. “I think Alex is one of the rare founders who can build a billion-dollar company over the next 10 years.”

Rodrigues said he plans to quadruple Embark’s engineering staff this year but declined to say how many employees it currently has. A press release listed people it had hired from SpaceX, StanfordAI and Audi’s self-driving team.

While studying applied science and mechatronics engineering at the University of Waterloo, Rodrigues and some classmates started converting golf carts into self-driving shuttles. That turned into a startup called Varden Labs, which has now become Embark.

While demonstrating the self-driving shuttles at college campuses around California, Rodrigues got a flat tire on the road to Fresno. During the four-hour wait for a tow truck, he noticed that every 18-wheeler that passed had a sign saying “Drivers wanted,” which was the inspiration for Embark.

“There are millions of trucks, and the U.S. is short 100,000 drivers right now,” he said. “The turnover rate for long-haul drivers is high, but turnover in local driving is less than 10 percent. No one wants to be away from home for a week, especially young people. I realized the best way to improve this is to take self-driving technology and apply it to trucks.”

Costello, the trucking industry economist, said the industry needs to attract about 89,000 new drivers a year over the next decade. With an average age of 49, compared with 42 for all U.S. workers, truck drivers are retiring at high rates, even while the industry is growing.

“We don’t have fruits rotting, because we have enough drivers for a cushion, but if we don’t get a handle on this (driver shortage), we could get to a point where things we take for granted at the store may not be there,” Costello said.

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